“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise wasn’t the downfall of May’s advisers so much as their earlier rise to brief but utter dominance in a party whose upper reaches have in recent times seemed to belong almost exclusively to Old Etonians. Hill was born ...”

“... attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a ...”

“... Strategy, a firm co-founded by Vote Leave’s head of communications and a former speechwriter for David Cameron, whose clients include Citibank, Spotify and Deliveroo. In all, according to analysis by the New Statesman, more than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business ...”

“... as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to disadvantage. Around the same time David Barker began to show the ways in which nutrition during pregnancy had long-lasting effects not just on babies’ growth, but also on their risk as adults of developing heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Barker argued that to improve the health of the next ...”

“... possible personal embarrassment. But here was something different. In place of the revelation of David Mellor’s bedroom attire came a drip-drip of inane yet telling details of purchases from John Lewis, which didn’t interrupt politics as usual so much as reconfigure it altogether. That Ed Miliband was revealed as the most frugal member of the ...”

“... and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of schools where she was ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our ...”

“... that might have paved the way for military action. When he lost the vote on the government motion, Cameron declared that public opinion was the decisive factor. He said that Parliament’s decision reflected the views of the British people, which was why it had to be respected. Ed Miliband said that the House of Commons had ‘spoken for the people of ...”

“... had infiltrated the Sangatte camp. A year later, with the agreement of the then home secretary, David Blunkett, and his French equivalent, Nicolas Sarkozy, the camp was closed. Blunkett called the Sangatte site ‘a festering sore in Anglo-French relations’. Sarkozy spun its closure as an act of goodwill towards migrants: ‘We have put an end to a ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed – in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.‘The Impermanence of Importance’ would have made a good alternative title for this ...”

“... regulators who looked incompetent. Branson’s strategy, his way of portraying himself as a plucky David in a world of corporate Goliaths doesn’t always work. Sometimes the charade is too transparent. Following the failed prosecution, BA turned its attention to alliances and takeovers to shore up its position, first with American Airlines, then Iberia, then ...”